Her father was the centre of all her childish thoughts and most vivid recollections, and nothing could ever really dislodge him from the first place in her affections. An interesting page from her earliest memories may be reproduced. When she was three or four years old, her father was a Wesleyan Pastor in Cornwall, where his ministry led to a revival in which hundreds of souls found salvation. One night Katie was taken by her nurse to the meeting, and, on arrival, found herself before a flight of steps leading up to the gallery. Thinking herself quite a big girl, she wished to climb, but nurse, fearing the crowd, snatched her up and carried her to the top. At length they were inside, and what the child then saw and heard remained for ever vividly impressed on her imagination. The great building was crammed. Away down on the platform stood her father, with her mother sitting beside him. He was leading the singing, keeping time with his folded umbrella, and this was the chorus:
Let the winds blow high, or the winds blow low,
It's a pleasant sail to Canaan, hallelujah!
How well did the eager-hearted little maid enjoy that voyage, and how proud she was of her captain! The winds blew low and the sun shone upon her in those days. But it could not always be fair weather. Often since that far-off Cornish time have the winds blown high, and sometimes the mariner has felt herself tossed, chartless and rudderless, on dark tempestuous seas; but ever the winds have fallen, the sun has shone out again over the waves; and to how many tens of thousands has this daughter of music sung, with sweet variations, her father's song—"It's a pleasant sail to Canaan, hallelujah!"
The Booth children were left in no mist of doubt as to their future. There was an end, a point, a purpose, in their life. They grew up in an atmosphere of decision. Many children are made timid, diffident, ineffective by their training. They are constantly told how naughty they are, till they begin to believe that they are good for nothing. The Booth parents acted on a different principle. They had faith in their children and for their children. When Katie was still a little girl in socks, her mother would say to her, "Now, Katie, you are not here in this world for yourself. You have been sent for others. The world is waiting for you." What a phrase that was to send a little girl to bed with! There she turned the words over and over in her own mind. "Mother says the world is waiting for me. Oh, I must be good.... How selfish I was in taking that orange!" The lesson was worth £1000 to a child. In the development of Katie's mind and character her mother's influence was naturally very strong. The fellowship between them soon became peculiarly intimate, and it was the mother's joy to find her alter ego in the daughter who bore her name.
Katie's memories of her early London life were bound up with the Christian Mission. Hand in hand with her sister Emma, and often singing with her "I mean with Jesus Christ to dwell, will you go?" she walked every Sunday morning along the great road leading to Whitechapel. Ineffaceable impressions were made on her sensitive mind by the open-air preaching at Mile End Waste, Bethnal Green and Hackney; by the apostolic spirit of holy enthusiasm; by the Friday morning prayer-meetings, where the officers met alone to plead with God and wrestle in tears for more power. All this became the warp and woof of her own spiritual life, preparing her for her high calling. And, though she could not remember the day of her new birth, she clearly recalled several times when she consecrated herself, body and soul, to God. In a great whitewashed building in the East End her father preached on "The King's daughters are all glorious within," and she prayed that she might have the inner purity which would make her a child of God. From a meeting of Christian workers she ran home to her room, shut herself in, and deliberately gave her heart and life to Christ. She could not, perhaps, realise all that her covenant meant, but one thing she understood—that she was called to yield herself completely to do His will and to save souls.
There was plenty of laughter and fun in that home. The Booth children were all born with the dramatic instinct, and the spirit of the Christian Mission invaded the nursery. Not only were the great dramas of the Bible—Joseph and his brothers, David and Goliath, Daniel and the lions, and a score of others—enacted there, but the meeting and the penitent form, the drunkard and the backslider, the hopeful and the desperate case were all reproduced in the plays of the children. Katie and Emma brought their babies to the meeting, and the babies generally insisted on crying, to the despair of Bramwell or Ballington, who stopped preaching to give the stern order, "Take the babies out of the theatre," against which the mothers indignantly protested, "Papa would not have stopped, papa would have gone on preaching anyhow." But the dramatic masterpiece was Ballington dealing with an interesting case—generally a pillow—coaxing, dragging, banging the poor reluctant penitent to the mercy-seat and exclaiming, "Ah! this is a good case, bless him! ... Give up the drink, brother." That is a scene which is still sometimes re-enacted to the delight of new generations.
Jesus Himself watched the games of the children who piped and mourned in the market-place. Life is none the less strenuous for its interludes of mirth. Catherine, who was dramatic to the finger-tips, was very early mastered by a sense of the sacredness of duty. The moral ideal set before her was the highest, and her conscience was tremulously sensitive. She was oppressed with the sense of what ought to be, and inconsolable when she failed to attain it. A word of rebuke cut her like a knife, and she would sometimes weep far into the night if she thought she had put pleasure before duty. It is a great thing to make religion real to children, and especially to give them a sense of the obligation to please Christ in everything. Mrs. Booth found Katie ready to go all lengths with her, and even to outrun her, in her ideas of what was right and what was wrong for Christians. It is amusing to hear that when the mother was going out one day to buy new frocks for her little girls, Katie's words to her were not "Do buy us something pretty!" but "Mind you get something Christian!" and that when Mrs. Booth came home with her purchases, and Katie rushed downstairs to meet her, the child's first inquiry was, "Are they Christian?"
But the sense of duty may become morbid if it is not transmuted by love. Many servants of God never learn the secret which makes Christ's yoke easy and His burden light. They have to confess to themselves that they cannot say, "To do Thy will, O Lord, I take delight." It would have been strange if any of the Booth children had not learned the secret. Catherine discovered it early, learned it thoroughly, and it became in after years one of the hidden sources of her power. As a child she lived in union with Christ; she practised and felt the Real Presence; she understood that Christianity is a Divine Service transfigured by a Divine Friendship. In Victoria Park there was a shady alley where she was in the habit of walking, because Some One walked beside her! In Clifton, where she lived for a time, she had a tiny upper room in which she felt that she was never alone! That was her childhood's religion, which she never needed to change. She found it to be utterly independent of time and place, form and ceremony. In the glare of public life, in the storm of persecution, in the hour of temptation and danger, she had always a cathedral into which she could retire that she might find peace. She was spiritually akin with the Hebrew mystics who lived in the secret place of the Most High, who had at all times a pavilion from the strife of tongues. In her Neuchâtel prison she wrote some simple words which sent a thrill through the heart of Christian Europe:
Best Beloved of my soul,
I am here alone with Thee;
And my prison is a heaven,
Since Thou sharest it with me.
CHAPTER II